Counterclockwise

by Tresca Weinstein

Harvard psychologist Ellen J. Langer’s newest book,
Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of
Possibility, is a riveting account of her groundbreaking
Counterclockwise study, which definitively illustrated how our
state of mind influences our state of wellness. A movie based
on the book is currently in production, with Jennifer Aniston
playing Ellen. Kripalu Online editor Tresca Weinstein spoke with Ellen about how to live
mindfully, what it means to take charge of your own health,
and why medical research is not the final word.

Tresca Weinstein In your 1979
Counterclockwise study, you immersed a group of older men in a
time period—the year 1959—when they were all young and fit,
surrounding them with cultural references from that year that
virtually turned back time for them. But just as important,
you and your colleagues treated these men as if they were
healthy, capable people despite the fact that many of them had
been considered near death’s door before coming on the
retreat.

Ellen Langer That’s right,
and we treated them that way right from the beginning. When we
got to the house the first day, I realized that they all had
suitcases with them. So when I got off the bus, the first
thing I said to them was, ”I don’t care if you move your
suitcases one inch at a time, or take things out and bring
them in one at a time, but it’s your responsibility to get
your luggage to your room.” And they did it. It was amazing,
given that these people, prior to this, seemed like they were
on their last legs. And over time they began to seem like
happy, reasonably healthy people on a vacation.

The
findings of the Counterclockwise study were remarkable, but
what was more remarkable was how palpable the changes were.
Some of the things that happened by the end of the study I
wasn’t willing to describe initially because they were almost
unbelievable. One of the men who had a cane stopped using it.
I was playing touch football with all of the men at the end.
These were men who, just a few weeks before, were hobbling
down to my office to interview for the study, and I was
wondering, why am I doing this, will they even make it through
the week?

Tresca Part of what you
concluded from this study, and many others you’ve conducted,
is that when people are conditioned to believe there are
certain limits to what they can do, that becomes true for
them—and vice versa, when they’re told they can do something,
they are often able to, even if the medical data says they
can’t.

Ellen People take the given
information that they’ve learned based on research without an
awareness of the limits of that research. Take the idea of
chronic illness versus acute illness—if you’re told it’s
chronic, you assume you’ll always have it, that there’s
nothing you can do about it. The consequences of buying into
that are enormous. Once you believe a disorder is
uncontrollable, you don’t try to control it. The research I’ve
done for 30 years suggests that may be a very big mistake.

Research yields probabilities—most of the time if we
do the exact same thing, we’ll get similar findings. It’s very
different from absolute fact. What two circumstances are
exactly alike? When a medical person runs a study, it’s
conducted with certain people at a certain time, with certain
amounts administered of whatever is being done or given. A
slight change in anything could change the result.

It’s very important that we recognize that most of the
world is a social construction. For example, imagine you have
a sign that says, “Keep off the grass.” People tend to obey
that sign. But if the sign says, “Ellen says keep off the
grass,” then people think, maybe I can negotiate with this
Ellen, or maybe Ellen doesn’t live here anymore. When you put
people back into the equation, absolutes give way to
possibilities. The results of even the best studies only speak
to some of us. Virtually all the things that seem impossible
are based on somebody else’s understanding of us, and on data
collected by people who are not omniscient. One of the things
that has always struck me as bizarre, for example, is how
willingly people go into a doctor’s office and look at an eye
chart, a series of random letters in black and white. You take
the results of whatever you do that day and say, this is what
my vision is. If you’d just been looking at something colorful
before you came into the office, if you’d had too much to eat
that day, if you were happy, if you were sad—all of these
things affect your vision.

Tresca In
your book, you use the phrase “health learner.” What does it
mean to be a health learner?

Ellen
Most important is to recognize that whatever our symptoms are,
for whatever the disorder, they don’t stay still. Sometimes
they’re less severe; sometimes we don’t even have them. So we
note those times and we ask questions: Why don’t I have
symptoms now? Why are they less than before? When you ask
those questions, lots of hypotheses leap to mind. If I have
asthma symptoms when I’m talking to Bob, I’ll want to decrease
my interactions with Bob, or change those interactions. But if
we assume it’s always going to be the same, we don’t bother
looking for solutions.

It’s crucial for the medical
profession to tune into this kind of thinking, because they
know they don’t know—now they need to know it’s okay that they
don’t know. When I personally seek out the help of a
physician, the most important thing to me is how willing that
person is to say they don’t know, and when they don’t know we
both try to find out. Medical people are very smart, often
very caring people—this is not an indictment of the medical
world. They have been trained to accept these absolutes in the
same way the rest of us have.

Tresca So
the alternative to accepting the “proven” realities is
practicing mindfulness, which you equate with health and
well-being.

Ellen Being mindful is
essentially the way to be fully alive and experiencing one’s
life. All you need to do to be mindful is to notice new
things—to become aware of how much you don’t know and stay
tuned in. When you notice new things, you end up happier,
healthier, and you even live longer. Mindfulness, as I study
it, is something you should be doing all day long—when you’re
alone, when you’re with people, no matter what you’re doing.
It’s not an activity like meditation or yoga, it’s part of
every moment of our lives. When you see somebody really
involved in what they’re doing, all they’re doing is being
mindful—noticing novelty.

Mindlessness is essentially
when you’re on automatic pilot, and that comes about by being
in these mind-sets we’ve unwittingly accepted as absolute
truths. If I “know” something is going to be pointless, I
don’t do it. If I already know the question you’re going to
ask, why listen to the question? If I’m walking somewhere I
walk every day, and every time I’ve taken this route it’s
fine, I may not see the pothole that’s there today.

Everything changes, and if we keep our eyes open to
those changes, we can transform our lives and our health.
Let’s say you’re paralyzed and I tell you that nothing, not
even that part of your body that’s paralyzed, stays absolutely
still and that you can, by following a strategy, improve. Are
you going to be able to jump up and run? Who knows? But you
probably will improve, and the larger point is that the
journey toward that improvement enhances your life.

Ellen
J. Langer, PhD, is the author of more than 200 research
articles and 11 books, including the international best-seller
Mindfulness, which has been translated into 15
languages.www.ellenlanger.com